For several years now the F.A.Premier League have taken an active part in supporting Nordoff Robins, a charity established to help sick children and adults through music therapy covering over 50,000 music therapy sessions every year in care homes, day centres, hospitals an schools.

Each year Nordoff Robins host the Football Extravaganza – an event attended by the great and the good of football in support of this charity. This year especially, the F.A.Premier League wanted to make a special commitment to coincide with the Premier League’s 20 seasons celebrations.

Working in association with Nordoff Robins and The F.A.Premier League., Milton Keynes design agency Deep Red Creative and specialist sports suppliers Sportsframe were commissioned to come up with a concept to help with this special celebration.

What they came up with was a very specialised edition - A book with a print run of just three and specifically for Nordoff Robins, which would then be auctioned at the event. The theme centred on the 20 seasons and was dedicated to the 20 players and managers who had most influenced the League over that time. Each individual had a spread dedicated to them with their performances and honours on one side, which was then personally messaged and signed by the player or manager. A specially created image would then be designed to sit alongside.

Quickly, the Premier league and Nordoff Robins established a guest only committee to mull over who they felt best deserved to be in the elite list of 20 names.

Deep Red Creative set out to create the design of the book itself and appointed Buckingham printers BCQ to work with them on this prestigious project. BCQ proved invaluable in coming up with creative solutions in terms of binding, cover stock and text pages. The cover would be buckrum covered on a 600ml board with text pages on 160gsm Acquerello Avorio from Fedrigoni . The design element involved the players names being de-bossed into the linen with the title ’Twenty icons’ and the Premier League 20 seasons logo gold foiled above and below the names. Maltby’s Bookbinders based in Oxford were entrusted with the production, binding and finishing of the book.

The race was then on to not only create the images but also the text pages. Time was a factor and the prospect of a finished book going through so many hands to be signed by the 20 individuals was too much of a logistical nightmare to be considered. The solution was to print the pages as flat sheets and then rivet them as a mobile document which the players could then sign. With names such as David Beckham, Jose Mourinho, Cristiano Ronaldo, Thierry Henry and Eric Cantona all out of the country the logistics of getting these sheets signed and returned within the set deadline date was demanding to say the least. Thierry Henry spent some time kindly signing his batch, before setting off to New York, taking the pages with him! Nordoff Robins committee member and Sky Sports reporter Geoff Shreeves was tasked with going to Madrid for the Mourinho and Ronaldo signatures.

The preference was for the books to stay as consistent as possible in terms of appearance which meant a request from F.A. Premier League Planning and Projects Director Peta Bistany that players and managers commit to the same message with each of their pages. Conformity has never been part of Eric Cantona’s personality and he treated each page as his own personal canvas with three original, but different messages and doodles.

The whole process of co-ordinating production schedules, arranging approvals of all statistics and signing off of proofs was co-ordinated by Deep Red’s Account Director Sarah Mammatt and BCQ’s Stuart Coote. The delivery and picking up of signed pages and their protection was to say the least, a fairly stressful exercise!

In the mean time there was the small matter of producing 20 separate player and manager images in the Deep Red studio. Creative Director Don Mammatt was tasked with creating the images and the strategy was to make them the same but different! Don Mammatt explains.

“We knew that this was a collection so it would have been wrong to have worked in a fashion where the images were too radically different to each other, so we wanted to retain a general style and then where we felt it was appropriate would look to inject elements of a players personality or character. All the files were created in Adobe Photoshop and I’ve lost count of the elements of layers within each file and even the number of drafts created as we just worked toward a solution we would be happy with. Part of the process is just shutting your eyes from what you’ve done for a couple of days before going back in and asking yourself – ‘am I still going to happy with this in 6 months time?’. Of course you can’t create something that will be universally liked but it was important that we would be happy with it and in terms of the football community and of course the purchaser, that it best represented those individuals.”

Ultimately between Deep Red and F.A.Premier League’s Peta Bistany, approval and sign-off of all the images was achieved before the files were sent to BCQ for production and print.

Slowly but surely the project was coming together. Maltby’s had the right hand pages with all the individual images and the text pages complete with player messages and signatures. All apart from David Beckham’s which had been delayed coming from Los Angeles. The schedule of the project meant any delay would have prevented the books being ready for delivery for the Football Extravaganza event. Maltby’s took the decision to pre bind the book and ultimately found a solution to the problem through a ‘tipping in’ process where the remaining page was glued in post production.

All 3 books complete with a specially designed and produced sleeve to the same finish and spec as the book covers, arrived at the Deep Red studio in Milton Keynes a day before the big event. 

To see more work from us, visit www.deepredcreative.com

The Football Extravaganza evening is a charity event but also a football event which including honouring those players who have made five hundred plus appearances in the Premier League together with specially invited top table of guests including Alan Shearer, Frank Lampard, Gary Neville and Graeme Souness.
Ultimately the books went to auction in front of over 1,000 guests at the Grosvenor House Hotel and neither the charity or those involved in its production could be disappointed with the results. All three books raised an incredible £30,000 each. All 20 images were also produced as a set of 20 canvases and these sold for £10,000 making the project as a whole £100,000 for the Nordoff Robins charity.